ABSTRACT

Philip Johnson's death in 2005 left a large hole in the architectural world. Johnson had held the position of arbiter of architectural taste for many years, perhaps even decades. Arguably the best-known architect to the general public at large, he was certainly the most famous in terms of self-invention and self-advertisement. The Glass House estate and his most prominent work from the 1960s through the 1990s represent an often unsettled attempt at a personal style and in some ways a liminal position on the architectural scene. That is, Johnson was often treated as a tastemaker whose actual corpus was considered fairly insignificant. He was a major figure whose work remains minor. The one exception to this judgment may well be his home.